The key drivers of rapidly changing tech, new methods and barriers to content discovery and generational shifts in consumer habits, will shape the future of Content Marketing. They are each important individually, but combined, and included in your planning, they will supercharge your strategy and provide a framework for the tough investment and creative decisions ahead.

To be ready for 2020, include the following elements in your strategy:

1. Personalise your brand experiences

Consumers want and expect content tailored to their needs and interests in real time. Trained by their experience of Google, Amazon and Netflix they are already impatient of inappropriate content and the benchmarks will continue to be raised throughout the next decade.

Innovations in Digital Tech are moving at speed and many of us are seduced by the headline grabbing impact of AI, VR, IoT and Voice. These are important, as recent research by Adobe shows that, the most successful businesses are already using or considering using AI.

However, we need to be wary of tech for techs sake. Marketing teams will need to understand the opportunities the tech offers but make decisions about what will work for their brand. Only those with a good understanding of the breadth and impact will be able to make the right decisions.

AI is impressive, there’s no doubt about it, as computers start to deftly mimic human behaviour and intelligence. The attraction for brands is clear – how expensive would it be to create 7 million individual designs for Nutella without AI? But creatives need not fear the tech, they should embrace it and explore how it can be used to enhance their own creativity. Empowered creative teams will confidently master AI and take their brands to a new level of individualised engagement.

Most businesses and marketing teams are run by the baby boomer generation. But our customers are increasingly from Gen X and Gen Y.

Source: Julie Atherton 2018

They have grown up in a different time, with tech and social media embedded in their lives. Digital is engrained in their behaviour and they are leading the movement from social media to private media as a means of social sharing. To ensure your brands content is found and shared it will be vital to understand your customers’ behaviours and their interactions in digital spaces. Creating content for WhatsApp, Messenger and private sharing will increase your brands visibility and circumvent the growth in adblocking.

To be delivering an effective content marketing strategy in 2020 brands need to start thinking now about their customers’ changing behaviour and expectations, the opportunities new tech offers, and the skills their teams will need to creatively harness the power of that innovation.

Why do it with the IDM?

Marketers who choose the IDM as their training partner make a real difference to their business, their customers’ lives and their own career.

The IDM is leading the ‘do revolution’

What counts today more than ever is not what you think, or even what you say, but what you can do. IDM qualifications and short marketing courses are designed for marketers who want to do more, faster, better.

Over the last 30 years we’ve trained over 100,000 delegates across 28 countries, from Microsoft to the BBC, John Lewis to Lego.